I had mentioned that I was learning Javascript to write a Kiva Opera widget. Some time ago I released the first version of my World Loanmeter widget, and I have uploaded two more since. Not much has happened between the first and the third release from the user POV, but a couple of things were interesting when developing it:

I made some heavy refactoring (see above) which made me learn some more Javascript and made the code much more flexible, so now the widget is not limited to a single Kiva API page of results, but to as many pages as needed to fetch whatever number of loans the user wants. Not to mention that the data source need not be a URL.

Now the widget actually has some configuration. Namely, the number of loans to show in the map. It also stores it persistently using the preference store, which is quite nice.

As I said, I used Git for it. I don’t “hate” it anymore, but I still find some things annoying, like the horrible, confusing names some options have (I’m thinking about “git checkout “ to revert the local changes, or “git diff –cached” to see the contents of the index/staging area; seriously guys, W-T-F?). I used to be skeptical about the “git add” for changes and then “git commit”, but I actually find it quite nice: it’s easier to plan a commit that way, and if you don’t want to plan it, you can always just “git commit “ directly. Also “git add -p” is really nice to commit just parts of a file (at last, someone copies some of the good stuff Darcs had had for ages!). Apart from Git itself, it’s cool that there is GitHub, so it’s easy to share your repositories without having to rsync to some web server or similar… not to mention that your project is much more visible that way.

But the World Loanmeter wasn’t the only pet project I was working on these past weeks: I also wrote a simple sudoku solver, demisus, in Ruby. The reason? Writing a prototype of a sudoku solver in a language I’m fluent with, to play with the design and get something interesting and easy to maintain… to rewrite it in Haskell. I have been trying to learn some functional language for some years now, but I never find a “project” that is interesting enough to write some “real world program” in the language and I end up not learning anything. After starting reading Real World Haskell, I really felt like trying to learn the language once and for all, and I figured that a sudoku solver was easy enough to write, something I know enough about, and something math-y enough to be reasonably easy to implement in Haskell.

So, if you’re interested in any of them, you can have a look in Github and even contribute ;-)